ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the Korean Wave popular culture in the global Internet age and addresses the sociocultural and political implications in their complexity and paradox within the context of global inequalities and uneven power structures. In the contemporary Western/European debate of transnational mobility, cosmopolitanism has become the privileged, prime term of analysis for characterizing qualities in people on the move and their identities. The extent of the Korean Wave overseas, including popular TV drama, has left observers in a state of surprise and puzzlement, searching for answers to explain the sudden interest in Korean popular culture. The rise of female individualization in urban Asia, albeit complex and often contradictory, has been reflected in, and enabled by, the gendered socioeconomic change – higher levels of educational attainment than ever before, labor market participation, feminization of migration, delayed marriage and non-marriage, declining fertility, increasing divorce rates and family break-down.
